In their VCE relationship, the acronym deriving from the participants' initials, the three companies are offering Cisco's new UCS blade server with built-in virtualization and connectivity, in the form of Data Center Ethernet for data networking, and Fiber Channel over Ethernet for storage. In doing so, they seek to exploit a perceived inflection point in the market for data center infrastructure.

UCS ships with VMware's virtualization technology on board, as well as management software from BMC, and integrates with Cisco's Nexus range of data center switches and EMC's storage hardware, in particular the latest generation of Symmetrix, called the V-Max, and its Avamar backup software, which works in virtual environments. The companies' IT services partner for the initiative, meanwhile, is Accenture. The partners tout UCS as a suitable platform to support virtualized data center architectures, arguing that their implementation is the necessary precursor for enterprises to embrace "private cloud" computing.

This term refers to the ideal of a flexible IT infrastructure that can react to the changing capacity or transaction requirements of a company's business in real time and on an ad hoc basis. The companies have added the 'private' epithet in an attempt to differentiate it from public cloud offerings from the likes of Amazon and Google, which require companies to write (or, worse still, rewrite) their applications to the provider's application programming interface in order to take advantage of the on-demand infrastructure and thus represent a proprietary lock-in.

When Cisco launched UCS in April, there was considerable speculation that it was entering into competition with what have hitherto been collaborators, namely HP and IBM. While this is true to a certain extent, the move is necessary if Cisco is to grow its presence in the data center beyond the switching infrastructure, where it is already the dominant player.

EMC, meanwhile, has been realistic about the prospects of other partnerships it has nurtured until now, which are destined to change on account of M&A activity in the sector. In particular, it was referring to EDS (which now belongs to a leading competitor in storage, HP) and Oracle (which in turn is acquiring another competitor, Sun). Both companies have been important go-to-market partners, and both relationships are now expected to wane.

Of course, VMware is still majority-owned by EMC, though their arms-length relationship enables it to work with the likes of IBM, HP and Sun. However, its world is also changing, in that X86 server virtualization is finally a competitive market following Citrix's and Microsoft's entries.

In other words, while all three of the partners in VCE need to remain 'heterogeneous' in their ability to work with the big server vendors, they have also identified a need to form a 'new kid on the block' to compete in the market for virtualized infrastructure. And in the case of EMC and VMware, at least, the formation of the alliance is as much a reflection of changes occurring in their respective competitive landscapes as it is of an internal dynamic to partner up for an assault on IBM's and HP's bailiwick.

As for the VCE alliance's potential for success, it could be argued that data center customers are unlikely to drop their longstanding supplier relationships with the likes of IBM or HP. Conversely, however, X86 blade technology tends to reduce the importance of the brand on the box, so much so that Datamonitor has heard data center operators referring to "a room full of AMD servers" without mentioning the actual server vendor. Thus, it would seem that there is an inflection point in the industry that favors new entrants.

In their marketing of UCS, then, it will behoove the VCE partners to highlight the fact that Cisco brings some patented memory extension technology to the party, which effectively enables more virtual machines to be hosted on the same piece of hardware than competing alternatives in the market. This, Datamonitor believes, is a compelling argument for switching from other blades to UCS.

A service of YellowBrix, Inc.